International Uyghur Forum

Born in 1952, a member of the House of Representatives, Gifu 5th district, elected 11 times. He has served as Chairman of the House of Representatives Steering Committee, Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party's Election Policy Committee, Chairman of the National Public Safety Commission, Minister of State for Abduction Issues, Minister of State for Disaster Prevention, and Minister of State for Land Stabilization. Since his election, he has worked tirelessly to resolve the abduction issue. He is also the Chairman of the Japan Uyghur Diet Members Caucus and the Chairman of the Diet Members Caucus for Investigating and Acting on Human Rights Violations by China.

Dolkun Isa is the President of the World Uyghur Congress. He has consistently advocated for the rights of the Uyghur people and has raised the issue at the UN, European Union and in consultation with individual states. He has worked to mobilise the Uyghur diaspora to collectively advocate for their rights and the rights of the Uyghur population in East Turkistan. He was recognized for his efforts in raising awareness of the human rights situation facing the Uyghur people and for calling for greater democracy and freedom in China by receiving the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s Human Rights Award in 2016. In 2017, he was elected as the Vice-President of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), of which the World Uyghur Congress is a member. In this capacity, he works with other marginalised or unrepresented peoples to collectively strive for democracy, freedom, and respect for basic human rights.

Nury A. Turkel is an attorney, author, foreign policy expert, and advocate with nearly two decades of experience working in the intersection of law, business, government, and the human rights community.

He specializes in corporate governance and regulatory compliance, national security, foreign policy, digital authoritarianism, and forced labor and supply chain risk issues.

He formerly served as Chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom after being appointed as a Commissioner by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in May 2020. He has testified before the US Congress, speaking about Uyghur internment camps and advocating a legislative response to China’s atrocities. His policy recommendations have been incorporated into US law and pending bills relating to Uyghurs and China.

As a rights advocate, he has led efforts to raise the profile of the Uyghur cause, previously as the president of the Uyghur American Association and now Chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, which he co-founded in 2003. He also advised past and present leadership of the World Uyghur Congress.

He is a senior fellow at Washington think tank, the Hudson Institute, where he works on US foreign policy and national security issues. He is also a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Turkel is a globally recognized opinion leader and policy expert on matters involving Uyghurs and China. His policy-oriented essays appeared in major publications such as Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, New York Times Foreign Policy, TIME, Newsweek, and USA Today. He frequently provides commentaries on TV and radio programs, including CNN, BBC, Radio Free Asia, Fox News, PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, and France 24.

In 2020, he was in TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World list, and in 2021, he was listed as one of Fortune’s 50 Greatest Leaders. In June 2021, he received the inaugural Notre Dame Prize for Religious Liberty. In September, he was awarded the “Global Soul Award” by Jewish World Watch.

He holds a Juris Doctor and a Master of Arts in International Relations degrees from American University. He resides in the Washington, DC, area.

In 2022, his memoir, “No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs” was published in the US, UK, and Finland.

Adrian Zenz is Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Washington, D.C. (non-resident). His research focus is on China’s ethnic policy, Beijing’s campaign of mass internment, securitisation and forced labour in Xinjiang, public recruitment and coercive poverty alleviation in Tibet and Xinjiang, and China’s domestic security budgets. Dr. Zenz is the author of Tibetanness under Threat and co-editor of Mapping Amdo: Dynamics of Change. He has played a leading role in the analysis of leaked Chinese government documents, including the “China Cables,” the “Karakax List,” the “Xinjiang Papers,” and the “Xinjiang Police Files.”

Ambassador (ret.) Kelley E. Currie has spent nearly three decades of experience working on the most complex foreign policy and national security issues in Washington DC and around the world. She is currently a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council; a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy; and a member of the board of governors of the East-West Center. She is also on the advisory boards of the Vandenberg Coalition and the Global Taiwan Institute. Ambassador Currie was unanimously confirmed in July 2017 as the United States Representative to the UN Economic and Social Council and Alternative Representative to the General Assembly, serving under Ambassador Nikki Haley. She subsequently served as interim head of the Department of State’s Office of Global Criminal Justice and as Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues and the U.S. Representative at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Uerkesh Davlet is an Honorary Chairman of the Campaign for Uyghurs. In November 2020, Mr.Davlet was appointed as the Executive Deputy General Secretary for the Taiwan Parliamentary Human Rights Commission. Mr Davlet is an active member of the international and Taiwan civil society. He now serves as chairman of the Taiwan Association for Democracy in China. He also sits in Emeritus Board at the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and serves as vice president for RSF’s advisory board, Honorary Chairman to the Ilham Tohti Institute. Mr Davlet is also a celebrated political commentator. He has written numerous political essays in both English and Chinese languages and published in many international media outfits, including New York Times, Washington Post, Wallstreet Journal, The Guardian, CNN, Far Eastern Economic Review, and many mainstream Chinese language newspapers and magazines. His essay “China Mocks the Spirits of Olympic” has won the Human Rights Press Awards Special Merit Award.

Tomoya Obokata is Professor of International Human Rights Law at York Law School, United Kingdom. He has extensive knowledge and expertise on transnational organised crime, particularly modern slavery. He currently serves as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.

Rushan Abbas is the Founder and Executive Director of the Campaign for Uyghurs. Under her leadership she introduced the “One Voice One Step” movement successfully organising demonstrations in 14 countries on the same day to protest China’s detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps. Ms Abbas works with groups around the world to promote the Uyghur cause and to encourage Uyghur women youth to engage in activism. In February 2022, Campaign for Uyghurs was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for its activism and advocacy to promote freedom of Uyghurs.

Dr Fernand de Varennes is since 2017 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues. As part of his mandate, he is the reference point at the United Nations on the protection of the human rights of national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. He is also Adjunct and Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland-Galway (Ireland) and Visiting Professor at the Université Catholique de Lyon (France) and at the European Regional MA in Democracy and Human Rights in SEE, Global Campus South-East Europe, University of Sarajevo (Bosnia-Hercegovina). He completed his law degrees in Canada (LLB, Moncton), the United Kingdom (LLM, London School of Economics and Political Science), and the Netherlands (Doctorate in Law, Maastricht). The author of some 300 publications in more than 30 languages, he is renown globally as a leading expert on the human rights of minorities and has been awarded a number of accolades.

Pavel Fischer has been a Senator of Prague 12 since 2018. He is also the Chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Security and Defence. Mr Fischer previously served as Czech Ambassador to France from 2003 to 2010.

Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1955, member of the House of Representatives, Saitama's 13th (formerly 14th) district, elected four times. Chairman of the Health, Labor and Welfare Committee, House of Representatives. He has served as Vice Minister of the Cabinet Office (in charge of abduction issues, regional development, measures to combat declining birthrates, child and child-rearing support, health and medical care strategies, measures to combat loneliness and isolation, international peace cooperation, consumer and food safety, and science and technology innovation policies), Parliamentary Secretary for Health, Labor and Welfare, and Deputy Secretary General of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. He is a visiting professor at Nihon University School of Medicine and a Doctor of Medicine. He has experience of being dispatched to Uyghur as a doctor for medical support from 1995 to 2000. He is also the Secretary General of "Japan Uyghur Diet Members Caucus" and the Secretary General of "Diet Members Caucus for Investigating and Acting on Human Rights Violations by China".

Omer Kanat is the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the World Uyghur Congress and an Executive Director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). He has two decades of experience as a broadcast journalist. Prior to his work at Radio Free Asia, he was Editor and later Senior Editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service. Omer Kanat has served as Vice President of the World Uyghur Congress since 2006 and Chairman of the WUC Executive Committee since 2017. He was born in Ghulja city in East Turkistan. Mr. Kanat is fluent in English, German, Uyghur, Turkish, Persian, Tajik, Dari, and Uzbek, and is functionally proficient in Kyrgyz and Kazakh.

Luke de Pulford is the creator and Executive Director of IPAC. Previously, he co-founded the anti-slavery charity Arise, which he ran from its inception until 2022. He specialises in human rights campaigning on Hong Kong and China more broadly.

Dr Sarah Teich is an international human rights lawyer, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Human Rights Action Group. She advises various organisations, including the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, Canadian Coalition Against Terror, Canadian Security Research Group, Tamil Rights Group, United Tegaru Canada, and CUBA DECIDE. Dr Teich focuses on helping these groups utilise domestic, foreign, and international mechanisms to seek justice and accountability for atrocity crimes and human rights abuses committed by state and non-state actors worldwide. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute, focusing on foreign policy and international law.

Mehmet Tohti is an expert on issues of Canada’s policy on China, Uyghur forced labour, Uyghur rights, Uyghur genocide and China’s state campaign against Muslims. Mehmet Tohti is the Executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project (URAP), an organisation that aims to be the most credible, reliable and effective Uyghur organisation representing the strongest Uyghur voice in Canada. Mr Tothi has received the CSRDN award for service to humanity and the Justice for All award for Uyghur Advocates of the year.

Kelbinur Sidik is a Chinese camp survivor. She used to work as a Chinese language teacher in a local primary school in East Turkistan. In 2017 she was taken to a concentration camp to teach Mandarin to Uyghur detainees. Ms Sidik witnessed torture, sexual abuse and violence against Uyghurs inside the internment camps and gave a statement before the Uyghur Tribunal in London in 2021. Since 2019 she has been living in the Netherlands.

David Lega is a Swedish politician and Member of the European Parliament since 2019. He serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Subcommittee on Human Rights. He uses his platform in the European Parliament to be a voice for the people who have the most difficulty being heard. He is a Board Member of the working group against antisemitism, Co-Chair of the Intergroup for Children’s Rights and the founder and Chair of the Uyghur Friendship Group in the European Parliament.

Gulbahar Haitiwaji is a Chinese camp survivor. She fled to France in 2006 with her husband and daughters. While her family applied for French citizenship Ms Haitiwaji decided to keep her Chinese passport and got a French residency permit. In 2016 she received a call from her former employer who asked her to return to Karamay to sign documents. In 2017 she was officially detained in a concentration camp in east Turkistan. After a long campaign of her daughter, she was finally released and able to return to France in 2019.

Sophie Richardson served as the China Director at Human Rights Watch from 2006-2023. She oversaw the organization’s research and advocacy on China, and published extensively on human rights and political reform in the country and across Southeast Asia. She testified to the Canadian Parliament, European Parliament, and the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Dr Richardson is the author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Columbia University Press, Dec. 2009), an in-depth examination of China’s foreign policy since 1954’s Geneva Conference, including rare interviews with Chinese policy makers. She speaks Mandarin and received her doctorate from the University of Virginia and her BA from Oberlin College.

Kaori Arimoto is a journalist. Since 2009, she has been covering the Uyghur issue and interacting with Uyghurs around the world to bring more awareness to their situation.

Born in Osaka in 1971, Tomoko Ako is a Professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. Professor Ako earned a degree in Education from the University of Hong Kong after studying at Osaka University of Foreign Studies and Nagoya University. After working as an expert researcher at the Embassy of Japan in China and as an associate professor at Waseda University, he became an associate professor at the University of Tokyo in 2013 and a professor there in 2020. His research interests include political and social changes in contemporary China, social relational capital in rural areas, migrant workers from rural areas to cities, land and household registration systems, and trends in intellectuals and civil society. He has authored or co-authored several books, including The Impact of the Hong Kong State Security Maintenance Law (Nippon Hyoronsha, 2021); Hong Kong: Where Are You Going (Shuppansha Zig, 2020); Criminal Justice, Legal Education, and Legal Awareness in East Asia (Gendaijinbunsha, 2019) ), “Superpower China no Yukue 5 (University of Tokyo Press, 2016), and “The Country that Feeds the Poor” (Shincho-Sensho, 2014).